Tucson chefs find tasty ways to honor 'City of Gastronomy' tradition

Chefs get creative with ancient agriculture in Tucson, the country's first UNESCO "City of Gastronomy."

Elaine GlusacChicago Tribune

Barrio Bread posts its 2 p.m. Saturday closing time on the door and on the internet. Yet by noon one Saturday in November, owner and baker Don Guerra was locking up to the moans of acolytes still streaming toward the bakery.

“But I’ve waited six months for the jalapeno cheddar,” pleaded one snowbird newly returned to town.

Alas, she should have known. It’s an open secret that Guerra can’t keep bread on the shelves past noon. He’s already made and sold 700 loaves using locally grown heritage flour today and won’t expand for fear of sacrificing quality. Ergo, sellouts by midday.

“Happens every week,” he shrugged, kindly offering to set aside a loaf for the jalapeno-cheddar fan on the next business day.

The farms that supply wheat for Guerra’s Desert Durum, Einkorn and Khorasan loaves lie within roughly 15 miles and extend an agricultural tradition in Tucson, the oldest continually farmed landscape in North America, dating back 4,000 years. That legacy, concurrent with a 300-year tradition of cross-cultural culinary pollination mixing Native American, Mexican and European influences, formed the bedrock of Tucson’s bid as the nation’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy.

American cities from Portland, Maine to Portland, Ore., proudly wear the foodie badge. But Tucson was the first to get the official medal from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 2015 through UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network program that encourages members to make creativity and sustainability a centerpiece of economic development. (In November, San Antonio was named the nation’s second City of Gastronomy).

“Tucson is the heart of agriculture in the U.S.,” said Jonathan Mabry, lead author of the UNESCO application and president of the nonprofit Tucson City of Gastronomy. “What’s interesting is that crops that were cultivated more than 4,000 years ago and wild desert foods that have been foraged for many more millennia back in time are all still part of our contemporary cuisine.”

Chefs across the city regularly raid the indigenous larder, using heritage ingredients like squash, corn and tepary beans with fluency. They pepper the menus at longstanding restaurants like Downtown Kitchen + Cocktails, where celebrity chef Janos Wilder does scarlet runner beans with pickled cholla buds and chicken with habanero pepita pesto. At the trendy newcomer Welcome Diner, lodged in a 1964 futuristic Googie landmark, the waitress steered me past the biscuit eggs Benedict to roast veggies with eggs and corn tortillas, describing the dish as, “Tastes like Tucson.”

And it’s not just local food that makes Tucson tasty. Mabry points to a cultural stew that continues to brew.

“When the first Americans arrived, they introduced crops and food traditions from back east and California,” Mabry said. “And then waves of later-arriving cultural groups contributed to this diversity of food cultures and this culturally layered, distinctive cuisine.”

Iron John’s Brewing Co. makes the most of local ingredients to add a distinctly Tucson spin to its beers. (Elaine Glusac and Randi Stevenson / Chicago Tribune)

Iron John’s Brewing Co. makes the most of local ingredients to add a distinctly Tucson spin to its beers. (Elaine Glusac and Randi Stevenson / Chicago Tribune)

He recommends the folklife festival Tucson Meet Yourself, a three-day event held each October, that features food from more than 40 different ethnic groups, including Native American Tohono O’odham, Peruvian, Filipino and Russian, as well as music, lowrider cars, Huichol bead artists at work, Yaqui painters and spoken-word performers.

UNESCO similarly takes a broader-than-restaurants view of gastronomy to highlight food artisans, seed banks and conservation programs that make a gastronomic tour of Tucson both intellectually and physically satisfying.

As a starter, savor the Mission Garden Project, which grows heritage foods from the pre-contact Hohokam people to the post-contact O’odham, Chinese and African-American farmers on a plot near the city’s landmark Sentinel Peak, aka “A” Mountain, that’s been cultivated for 4,000 years.

Brace yourself for zone-9 envy when browsing the racks of the Native Seeds/SEARCH shop. The seed bank has cataloged, propagated and conserved ancient vegetable varieties from rare chiles to umpteen varieties of tepary beans. Bait for green thumbs, the retail shop also deals heritage staples like foraged herbal tea blends, cookbooks, Native American horsehair baskets and locally made salsas.

Chefs regularly stock up on the shop’s unique ingredients. During my visit, Devon Sanner, executive chef of the Carriage House, an event space and cooking school owned by James Beard Award winner Janos Wilder, interrupted his own shopping to patiently explain how to use beans — the creamy Mayocoba and the sturdy brown lentil-resembling tepary — that I picked blindly from the shelves.

“It’s not hard,” he encouraged me. “And you get to play with some fun flavors.”

It could be a function of size (Tucson’s population is about half a million) or foodie enthusiasm, but gastro-nauts may have little trouble meeting the local heroes. At the family-owned Rincon Market, I found butcher Ben Forbes of Forbes Meat Co. — whose sausages appear on menus from Charro Steak to Ermanos Craft Beer & Wine Bar and Downtown Kitchen + Cocktails — breaking down venison and confirming tightknit culinary circles.

“As a community and a culture, we support each other,” he said.

Tucson’s foraging tradition, another pillar of its UNESCO application, is alive, well and highly quaffable at Iron John’s Brewing Co., a worth-the-search microbrewery known for small-batch experiments using local ingredients. (Trust Google Maps to find its location in an office park.)

When I stopped in, owner John Adkisson, a former accountant and dedicated home brewer who once set himself the task of making every beer style that exists, poured me a glass of girly-pink prickly pear gose made with local goat yogurt and seasonal cactus fruit smacking of tart watermelon rind.

“Our philosophy is, let’s make it our own and make it unique and delicious and distinct to this area of the U.S.,” Adkisson said as he took me on a tour of his fridge, where spruce tips, creosote flowers and spent grain from Barrio Bread awaited future brews.

History may be the foundation of Tucson’s City of Gastronomy, but its resident culinary artists champion innovation in appetite-whetting ways.

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